Well, it’s hard to stay mad at Sweeney for blowing my cover, now that it turns out that Superintendent Stachowicz is a golfclubatlas.com member and Dedham Polo is ensconced in The Next Fifty.
Let’s be frank – I am not a particularly keen student of golf course architecture, and I suffer from a nagging case of attention deficit disorder. Sadly, I have been known to glaze over on the back nine of a tour. So there I was, standing on the sixteenth tee at Dedham, gazing at the gorgeous lemon clubhouse across the chasm which defines holes one, two, four and eighteen, thinking about my scorecard and a cold beer, when all of a sudden my host goes “something something something bottle hole – that hillside on the right covered with trees used to be the alternate fairway . . . we’re going to restore that and the bottle bunkers” and then my eyes sort of bugged right out of my head.
The course has that large, spread-out feel common to Raynor. I hesitate to call it “sprawling” like Yale, but I just love the way that the routing treats massive features with the same “damn the torpedoes” philosophy. A perfect example is the second hole, which has a creek directly in the landing zone, and a greensite on top of a mountain.
But, it is now plain that what overwhelms me about Raynor is just the pure visual artistry, the dazzling forms and the constant attention to spectacle. Bradford Tufts’ attraction to the third hole could not be a better illustration. This hole is really nothing more than a 200-yard-long ramp that tilts slightly down and to the left. The green is without contour. Yet, with a monster blowout dominating the view to the left, fescue obscuring the straight view, and a chain of hairy bunkers leading out diagonally from the front right of the green, this humble slope is turned into a feast for the eye.
Other favorites included the classic Knoll seventh, featuring a drive over a bunker-studded hillside and concluding with a green that erupts out of nowhere, and Home, with real risk and reward on the dogleg, and an approach that maintains great contours even as it ascends steeply past some exposed rock to a green that, shrouded in the evening mist, might as well have been Camelot.